Two Tickets for the Knight Bus
by Xanthous Xyster
Summary: Memories obliviated. Evidence of torture. A name tattooed on his wrist. The psychological story of a certain character's dark journey to seek vengeance during the cold winter of 1997 when the Dark Lord cast his evil influence over all the wizarding world.


Two Tickets for the Knight Bus

The First Trip

_For some crimes, death is not punishment enough. _

Something is off. And it's not the shitty driving of the Knight Bus at fault. My head lurches of its own volition; a banshee on a megaphone screams inside of it.

Either the passed-out drunk in the cot next to me or I smell like piss and firewhiskey. My thoughts are groggy. I'm in pain. Everything moves.

My sole memory insists itself upon my brain.

The scene: _Pursuers behind me, a strange light before me, and my passage down a long hallway._

_My own red hands, shaking with my shot motor control, raising and digging into the carpet, dragged me forward. The weakest of movements was agony, but I knew that I had to press onward. I knew that I had to get to that light emanating from the room before me._

_Voices and faces lining the walls swirled as the sound of a soft tread on the carpet approached. He was coming. There was a chill in his approach and my body froze in anticipation. My heart hammered for me to keep moving, but my body refused to respond. My right hand, outlined in the radiant light ahead, was raised one last time and stretched out before me in the very picture of a dying man's persistent resolve, that man who voicelessly, as his last act, reaches his hand towards the sun, reaches forward, reaches and grasps for life, reaches and wills, reaches and reaches, before his terminal exhalation and collapse into death. So too, held I my hand until something cold began a slow caress up my rippled back, and that right hand of mine, like those luckless dead men's, fell to the earth._

Only, death did not embrace me.

Death toyed with me.

In its hand.

For that cold sensation, that which collapsed me then in a fear akin to death, it too, was a hand, because predators and killers, they, also, extend their hands, and they, also, reach and reach forward, but when they do, they grip what they seek. They hold it and they squeeze it and they destroy it. A hand of this sort held me.

_This hand was petting me. And I, like a broken dog, suffered the false touch of the master, the one that had so recently dealt blows, to tenderly stroke my back. _

"But be wary!" I grumble, momentarily alighting from my cot, "Play not too long with the bowtruckle in your hand lest it run up your arm!" I sit back down. "Yes! Yes, and gouge out your eyes! Yes."

_Then, unbelievably, I whimpered. Yes, I whimpered. Indeed, I did make for a good dog. The soft voice of a male alto spoke words in admonishment and I, like that dog that I was, understood little of the human garble except for the intent. No. Wait. It seemed that, rather, I had been a bad dog, for I understood the last word._

_"Crucio!"_

_Blinding pain like caustic lightning. My body, having forgotten that it was already aching in agony, learned and relearned what true pain was, as it danced from searing jolt to stabbing throes, throes which ripped red my cracked lips with the endless scream, a screaming scream that cried without breath for the release of death, but neither death nor even the small comfort one receives in the thought of death could break through the infinite waves of torture as they crashed ceaselessly down upon me. _

_It was not my first taste of the Cruciatus curse, that unforgivable curse of torture, but a learned palate does not better swallow that pain._

_The body cannot become numb to the Cruciatus curse. Each usage renews the body's ability to feel pain. Each fresh wave of pain, though without any recess in between, is just as sharp as the one preceding it. There is no inner shelter of the mind to hide within. The agony is everywhere and the agony is everything. Even cracking under the pain is no refuge. You can only suffer and suffer until you are annihilated completely and left as a living corpse like one of the Longbottoms._

The name slips into my recollection and gives me pause.

"Longbottoms?"

Longbottoms? The name rings hollow in the locked corridors of my memory. I taste the word again:

"Longbottom?"

I don't know who the Longbottoms are or were, but the name sounds like it fits, as if, in some strange way, I can innately know the owners of the name have been tortured and crushed without possessing the ability to remember them. I guess even that small remembrance is a start.

Mental note: find out more about Longbottom.

_Perhaps my torture stopped at some point. _

_I was in a room with a shining marble floor. I knew the room. A dozen doors on the dozen faces of the dozen walls, and each face would spin round and round whenever all the doors were closed_― _whether you yourself were reeling in pain or not. It was named the Room of Chance. Two other faces, those of humans atop human bodies, also in the room, jutted out of the corner of my eye._

_"Admit it, Saul. He's clearly of no more use to us."_

_A woman had spoken. My short-sightedness blurred the facial features, and I struggled to focus my eyes. A man responded. _

_"You think that he can be thrown out so easily? And here I thought you had studied love for a living, my Little Lola Lobalug."_

_I knew the voices. The male's was that same alto which had invoked my latest torture, and there when it spoke the word "love", it spoke in a caustic derision which, if any were near, would have made the most compassionate of lovers turn celibate lest they be associated with that word and that way it was sounded. _

_The woman's voice was sung at an excessively girlish high pitch._

_"You don't love anything."_

_The man almost sounded disappointed when he again spoke:_

_"I know..." I yet struggled to discern his face, but he paused here, probably in order to smirk before he proceeded to his pun, here, "I must follow in your shadow, my Umbrageous Umbridge. Well, it looks like we'll have to start our experiment all over."_

_The female, Dolores "Lola" Umbridge _― _for I knew her in my mind then _―_ waited, impatiently. Her voice was prompting, "Well..."_

_The male, Saul, leaned in. And he grew his smirk large till it smothered my field of vision. Taut complexion. Thin lips. A nobleman's lips, withheld from the elements but for a single scar that jutted up from one corner and augmented that hyena's smirk well beyond a human's natural capability to smirk. _

_I saw him then. This was the man that so recently had tortured me, who had done it before, who had done it and enjoyed it, and who my body knew had not limited himself to magical means. And here he was mere centimeters from my crumpled body. My muscles strained. The rage of a savage beast was in me. You can only beat a dog so many times. I urged myself to kill. But all the straining and all the urging in the world could hardly wiggle my pinkey let alone raise my hand to strangle him. His cold hand lifted my head up by my shaggy hair. Eye to eye. All my fury focused into my eye. And he matched it. And even here, eye to eye, his hard cobalt eyes flashed a fierce condescension. We gazed through those eyes, which are the windows to the souls, and I saw his and it was black as a dementor's._

_He spoke. This close to me. And his breath exhaled as a hag's humid spew with that strong scent of freshly gobbled children emanating from the cracks between the gums._

_"On the whole, I can't say this will be the most holistic heal. Neither will you be wholly better, afterward. We'll be but two holes in your whole hollow memory, and who knows? If we happen to meet again, you won't even hold a grudge against me." The smirk. Though his eye was locked to mine, I could feel it grow on his face, like it had been struck by an out of control engorgio charm, as the corner of his eye crinkled upward. "You may even hold me as a friend."_

_My face returned to the chill of the marble floor. _

_Two blurred faces again._

_A polished wand's shaft blinked in front of me. Thirteen-and-three-quarters-inches birch with a unicorn hair core and my face. _

_"Obliviate!"_

_A sleepy green._

_Then, nothingness._

The problem: no one remembers being obliviated. That's the whole point.

And yet all my memories were pitched clean but this one.

Maybe a mistake? Maybe Saul's spell failed? Maybe the memory was stronger than the charm? Merlin's balls. Save that sort of riddle for a sphinx. Not like I remember the complexities of the Memory Charm, anyway.

More importantly, this let me remember the bastard's face. "Ha ha." I don't know dungbombs about myself, but I've got him. "Ha ha." I'll get him back. "I got your name and I got your face." I'll find him, I'll have my revenge, and I'll smash that smirk off his ugly face.

His face. That face that grew and smothered all my vision. The only human face I could call to mind. Still, it burns into my memory. It was possible that the obliviate spell did indeed fail and failed completely and it was merely that that face, that vile and wicked face consumed all my memory in addition to all that I could see at that time and it, burning into my eye's every rod and cone, burnt its visage deeper back through the optic nerves to the brain and, breaching the temporal lobe, grew and caught every neuron in my mind up in its fiery wake till it merged with the lingering feeling of the cruciatus curse and there made one monstrous phantom which dominated my every being. And it was that phantom, and not any memory charm, that purged every thought in my mind till I knew only anguish and the one to blame for it. I knew him and his face and it was all I knew.

The bus lurches and stops. Below, a squeaky voice calls out to the world:

"Welcome to the Knight Bus, emergency transport for the stranded witch or wizard. Just stick out your wand hand, step on board, and we can take you anywhere you want to go..."

I let the conductor's voice fade, as another passenger embarks.

_With my sole memory, I woke up earlier today, or_ ―

It was 1:15 on my wrist and dark out the windows. Hmph, Happy Christmas.

_With my sole memory, I woke up yesterday, December 24, 1997, on some old lady's cold stoop in Upper Flagley, like I'd been put out with the rest of the trash. My reflection in her door frame window like a shrunken gorilla, unshaven and untamed. Even my eyebrows were wild and bushy. I had gotten glasses, thin rims and thin wire temples leading back into the depths of the untamed grey; my yellow eyes were sharp beneath the frames._

_Dirty, tattered robes._

_A carpet bag with a second pair of tattered robes and a meager pouch containing not even enough silver to kill an infantile werewolf._

_Photos in my robe of people I don't know. They call me "Frank." One of them, a coquettish brunette named Karla, a French sickle with these deep eyes like you wouldn't believe them, says she loved me, says she's dead._

_Tattoo on my inner right wrist says my name is Janus Thickey, though. And no consensus on my identity even among the photos. _

_Two names, but no identity._

_Watch on my other wrist._

_A limp in my step._

_No wand. _

_I wandered for a bit, asked about. My instincts guided me. I played it real careful._

_No one could give nothing from just the name Saul, but his cohort, this Lola Umbridge ― her name carried weight. Former Headmistress of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Current Senior Undersecretary to the Minister of Magic and Head of the Muggle-born Registration Committee Dolores Jane Umbridge. The Brass. If a name's heavy, then it's probably brass._

"Your turn will come, Lola."

I don't know if I'm the type of man to hurt a dame, but I got a feeling, if it were the right one, I just might like it.

_I hinted about Memory Charms. About the counter-curse. About reliable healers. But if it had been the Ministry that done did me like this, I hadn't an inkling of taking a step towards St. Mungo's. Now, out of the cage, this dog wasn't going back in. Besides, with no wand and no other ID, they might not even take me. Fortunately, I managed to meet up with a helpful witch who recommended a discreet healer off Knockturn Alley, London. A supposed memory specialist. A juicy opportunity. _

_I bit. _

_Then, the Knight Bus. Now, here._

"'Scuse me, uh, Mr. Trunks. It's your stop."

The Knight Bus's conductor, that eternal teenager with a face riddled with acne the size of quaffles and a demeanor as awkward as his perpetually cracking voice, has come to rouse me. I gave Trunks as my alias, though these names Frank and Janus had meant just as little to me.

"I'll get your trunk, Mr. - uh - Trunks."

Buggy Shiftlock. The gilded name on the conductor's gaudy purple uniform's wrinkled lapel. Shiftlock? Not... Shunpike? There's a dull ache in my head. Fleeting images dancing out of sight. I rub my temple.

Memory Fragments:The name Stanley Shunpike written in black ink. Another youthful face swirled into my mind, that same purple uniform on a boy in a photograph. The stupid boy crying. Tears behind closed eyes. Chains.

Longbottom, Shunpike. Two drops of memory that made it past whatever dammed up my mind. The latter should be easy enough to investigate.

The Knight Bus comes to an abrupt stop. My bed, lurching forward, propels me onto my feet. The jolt snaps me back from my mind. I catch a glimpse of an aged lion roaring noiselessly on my carpet bag as it disappears with the conductor onto the lower floor.

I pass around the drunk man, who somehow maintained the honking snore of his deep sleep even in the most violent pitches of the Knight Bus's passage, and hobble down the steep staircase.

Empty beds hodgepodge on the bottom floor. Two armchairs with the stuffing coming loose have taken the place of the driver's and conductor's seats. In the one, the driver is a shriveled bloodless fossil whose eyes, framed by comically large owl-rim-glasses, examine me out of a rear-facing mirror. He looks like he's 28 knuts short of a sickle ― or just a nut.

"Buggy." I croak. "Buggy, you new here? Wasn't there a Stanley Shunpike working as conductor on the Knight Bus? Your age, ungainly lad with large ears, and acne like he'd just come down with spattergroit. His day off?"

The conductor, frozen in hesitation at the moment of tossing my bag out the door. Trembling, he pivots and his eyes find their rest upon the driver's shoes. He glances at me, then back down.

"M-M-Mister Ern, er, Ernie, our passenger is wondering about Stan, and I just thought you'd be the one who'd tell him."

"You insult him by speaking his name, Bug."

Ern's words resound all the more cruelly to his much younger peer because of the speaker's inherent apathy. To Ern, that he should deride his conductor is as settled a matter as the outcome of a fixed quidditch match. No passion. No malice. No intent. Just derision. The hollow shell of a wizard sits in that armchair. All night long, he leaps across space, ferrying the lost and stranded to their destination. Traveller, illuminate the tip of your wand, stick it out. And to your feeble light in the night, no matter how faint and no matter where you may find yourself, his bus's bright headlights will materialize. But somewhere along this road, Ern lost his own light. Ern was the only lost one who never reached his own destination. Each night, the old man would try his damnedest to crash his bus into every car, streetlamp, or mailbox that might be so affronting as to present itself upon his field of vision. This too, however, always would come to no avail. The charms cast upon the Knight Bus made both it and these objects incapable of coming into any contact with each other. Each street sign he should propel himself toward, would nimbly dance out of the way. Each tree he should careen towards, would uproot itself and scurry to safety. And each muggle smashed by his grill, the bus would pass ineffectually through like an ethereal ghost. Additionally, the bus always brought the passengers to their destination, in the end. Even if Ern had purposefully driven in the opposite direction, to the wrong place, the Knight Bus would arrive at the proper destination. Ernie sits in his ragged armchair. And everything moves about him.

"Stan Shunpike," Ern continues, "my only friend. A good lad. If only he were here. He was diligent, proud, hard-working, and always there to share a word or to give an ear. He was no Merlin, of course, but he was always hopeful, always helpful, and he was everything I could've asked for in a fellow human being. You, Bug, are as tepid as a flobberworm. Your simple job is to converse with our customers, but you're shier than a pygmy puff and can't speak half as well. You don't have the prerequisite skills to be alive, let alone our conductor. If you were paid in leprechaun gold, you still would be overpaid. Mark me: you'll suffer when they find out your blood's dirtier than mud, you will, Squib."

The abashed teenager has shuffled as far up against the wall and away from Ernie. His blinkers fixate firm on the ground. He fights off tears.

"I... I am not a squib."

Squibs. Bloody squibs.

"You're lucky I've let you stay. If the Ministry found you or― just the same― the mob..."

The lad is hushed. Does his best to sob silently.

In the mirror, the bus driver's eyes have never left me ― I see only a reflection of Ernie's former self.

Two of his fingers extend from their hand's grip on the Knight Bus's steering wheel and flex and extend and flex and return to the steering wheel.

"Closer."

Apprehension. But I hobble forward. The armchair holding the Knight Bus driver rotates inward. Along with it, Mr. Ern. His two arms remain suspended before him like the typical dramatic depiction of an inferni. That, or after years and years of driving with his arms held thus before him, he's grown stiff and his arms stay fixed there before him, not above his shoulders, not below his waist.

"I see your pain in your step, and there in your eyes... I know that pain. You have suffered. But you, at the least, know what happiness is, do you not?

"Sure, driver. And the lad?"

"You're not happy, though?"

Hmph. "No, driver, s'ppose I'm not. About Shunpike?"

"Stan Shunpike, yes, indeed. You're not happy, but you yet retain the capability of imagining what it is to be happy. Conversely, Stan cannot. The dementors can do that to you, if you let them, or even if you don't. For a whole year, those abyssal-soul-suckers fed on Stan, but it must've felt like much more than a year to Stan. They took him young, but he was old when he left. For every waking second and in his dreams, they forced him to relive his worst memories over and over till well after he went mad and all but those terrible memories were eaten away."

My own torture and that one named Saul's consumptive face flashes into my mind. Stan and I. Our only memories ― those of our torture. All else was stripped away. Mental Anguish. And my grey hair. And my fractured body. Both minds and bodies aged.

But this lad's torture had been different, somehow. I knew that.

I wasn't broken.

Cracked, but not broken. Down, but not out. Grieved, but with vengeance waiting.

"Why?"

"Ha ha ha." The old man wheezed through a toothless mouth, not so much a laugh as death throes. "No good reason. That's why:

"No good reason.

"Thrown in Azkaban under suspicion of being a Death Eater. The innocent child. My Stan, a Death Eater? Isn't that funny?"

No.

"I didn't believe it. Went to the trial― still don't believe it. I was good friends with the parents, too― before they went that is. And they didn't last long.

"Not a week later, Stan's father was laid off from work. You see, having a son affiliated with You-Know-Who doesn't make you popular at the office. The only place he could find work was Greedlehorn's Gobstone Factory, testing each batch of gobstones' putrid liquid. It is a job more fit for a house elf than a man, but gold is gold. He couldn't let the liquid be too putrid. Couldn't let the stones squirt too much. Of course, the only way to actually test Gobstones is take each blast in the face. Died from an infection with nasty pustules four months in.

"I'm sure they told Stan the bad news. Why not? They wanted him to suffer. And this was more sorrow that they could force upon him.

"His mother was already grief-stricken since her son's shameful imprisonment. She was bedridden after her husband's death; she just plain refused to take care of herself and each day she'd protest her son's innocence. When this year's June came, she was already a ghost in a solid body."

The driver's voice fades as if all was understood from what had already been spoken. I'm forced to speak.

"What happened in June?"

Buggy's choked sobs resonate in the Knight Bus and out into the cold, dark night.

Mr. Ern surveys me. Only his eyes, popping out from the body's lifeless pallor, move.

"You know of the mass breakout and collapse of Azkaban in June, don't you?"

Nod. (No.)

"When the doors came open, my Stan stood among the Death Eaters that walked away. And he still does."

Another pause.

"In the papers, it was. And I guess it showed the Ministry'd been right. It was then that Marissa Shunpike, Stan's mother, who lived solely upon the light and hope of her son's innocence, having read the news, turned her wand upon herself. Her baby boy had been guilty."

Pause. Awkward? What does he want me to say?

Something perverted inside me:

Question: What's black and white and red all over?

Answer: Marissa Shunpike's Daily Prophet.

I say nothing.

"I know what you're thinking. You assume I'm going to say that he was threatened or that he was under the Imperius Curse?

"No.

"I do think otherwise. I think Azkaban really broke Stanley Shunpike. Infinite darkness worked itself upon a fragile boy until he could no longer see the light. It's the simpler answer. It's easier to believe than Death Eaters picking him to be their partner out of all the other wizards they could choose to control. Stan chose them, and they accepted. He had long lost the ability to feel such emotions as love or happiness before he was finally separated from the dementors; all he knew was to suffer and once out of Azkaban, he could only bring suffering to others. He was and is anguish personified. Society had wanted him to be evil and they had fulfilled their wish."

"But why?" I still don't fully get in. "Who allows that to happen to an innocent person?"

"The Minister of Magic, Rufus Scrimgeour―"

Ernie keeps talking, but suddenly, as I hear the name Rufus Scrimgeour, a violent shiver overtakes my body. Heartbeat. All my muscles tense. Nerves under scar tissue prickle. My eyes swiftly dart back and forth. The open door. The closed windows. Heartbeat. What an emotion! What emotion? Revolt. Hatred. Disgust. Fear. Heartbeat. Then and now, I know that I fear this Minister of Magic like he's my bane. Though I do not know him, I loathe him. Anger. Fright. Heartbeat. A fear-gripped heart pounds into my ears. I'm inside myself. Without, Ern's deadpan voice carries on.

Mental Note: this Minister of Magic and why I fear him.

'Fear of the name only increases fear of the thing itself.'

Rufus Scrimgeour. Ugh. Even at the thought of the name, I tremble.

Then, it was the Ministry? They tortured me?

Hesitantly, I return.

"―create the illusion of safety. Wanted to put on a good face, eh? And where did that get us? And where did that get him? Official word was he stepped down in August, but I'm not old enough to be that blind. Death Eaters got to him. Killed him. And that's better than he deserved―"

Ern's stiff as death arms curl in. For the first time, intonation in his speech, red in the pale of his cheeks. A sparkle in his eyes. Passion. I'm not dead yet, Ernie scolds the open tomb.

"He did worse to Stan, and I'd do worse to him. If it were up to me, I wouldn't give him death. Give him to the dementors, a hundred years imprisonment for every innocent he sent to Azkaban. Kill those he loved in front of him. Torture him with no end, heal him up, give him hope, then torture him again from the top. Break him into pieces then break each individual piece, then crush each iota left into nothingness.

Smile. Suggestions for what I might do when I got my hands on that Saul.

"I like the way you think, old man."

A pause.

"Do you?"

Smile. He continues:

"The Knight Bus will always be waiting for you. Any road, any alley, when again you are in need, the Knight Bus will be there to pick you up and deliver. I will see you again."

The color again drains from Ernie as his chair rotates back, his arms return to their position atop the steering wheel and the smile ceases from that face fixed upon the road ahead.

"Memory Lane, London."

Our conversation is over. I guess that's what it means. I've arrived. For a moment, I eye Ern like he's a Muggle's wind-up automaton that might any minute burst back into life.

Scrimgeour: August. Dead half a year? Then he didn't help to torture me? Or... or what? Why the shudder at the name? Why the... fear? I shake my head. Hmph. And nothing else about Shunpike had rung a bell.

I make my ready.

Buggy, yet to regain his composure, drying the last of his tears. I take up my bag from his feet where it had fallen.

Ern makes no more motion as I step by him and off his bus. He's still motionless as the door closes and the bus begins to move. Lost and at the wheel.

Hmph. "Troubled times, troubled minds."


End file.
